Despite Heavy Rain, Global Climate Strike Takes Place in Taipei

AS PART OF an international week of actions taking place from September 20th to September 27th worldwide, Taipei’s iteration of the Global Climate Strike took place today in spite of rainy weather. Several hundred attended in the morning, but participants tapered off to sixty to eighty by the afternoon.

Photo credit: Brian Hioe

The protest, which took place all day, began at 10:30 AM outside of the Legislative Yuan. The demonstration then marched to the Red House by Ximending, past the 228 Memorial Park, Taipei Main Station, and back to the Legislative Yuan. The demonstration finished in the mid-afternoon outside the Executive Yuan. Demonstrators handed petitions to government officials outside the Legislative Yuan and the Executive Yuan.

As with the preceding protests that have taken place as part of the Fridays for Future protests in Taipei, the demonstration was highly artistic. While Fridays for Future for protests have not been a regular event in Taiwan, a protest in May involved performers dressed in spandex costumes. These performers were billed as alien conservationists who had come to visit Taipei from the cosmos in order to promote environmentalism.

During the demonstration today, a group of performers dressed in white and covered with white paint walked zombie-like through the streets of Taipei, sometimes crying and screaming, as representing the victims of future environmental disasters. A large dinosaur puppet and a dragon puppet, resembling the dragon figure used in Chinese dragon dances, both represented the “monsters” of environmental destruction. Representatives of the Extinction Rebellion movement were also present, consisting mostly of expats living in Taiwan.

Dragon puppet used during the demonstration. Photo credit: Brian Hioe

In speeches, organizers highlighted the protest as a youth-led event, seeing as the Fridays for the Future and Global Climate Strike has been youth-initiated, as originally called for by Greta Thunberg. Thunberg was fifteen when she first began environmental activism, calling attention to how young people have been deprived of their future by the environmental destruction caused by adults. Thunberg gave a speech to world leaders at the United Nations earlier this week.

Organizers pointed to the need for Taiwan to transition toward renewable energy, shifting away from fossil fuels, and suggested that Taiwan could set an example in “Asian values” by pushing for renewable energy.

To this extent, organizers cited that a healthy environment was a human right, as in the right to clean air and water, while also bringing up that political parties in Taiwan had not done enough to defend this right. Speakers also brought up how ideologies centered around endless economic growth were the main cause of environmental destruction worldwide, with the belief that the planet offers a limitless supply of resources for economic exploitation, leading to a failure to be attentive to the interdependence of humans and nature.

Former vice president Annette Lu, currently the presidential candidate of the Formosa Alliance. Photo credit: Brian Hioe

Presidential candidate Annette Lu was among those who made an appearance at the protest, as one of the few politicians that made an appearance there. Lu connected her past experience fighting for democracy to the present environmental movement, while also bringing up the historical relation of the environmental movement and the Taiwanese democracy movement.

In the meantime, it remains to be seen what will force politicians in Taiwan toward sound ecological policy in Taiwan. Growing issues regarding air pollution and the question of whether Taiwan should depend on fossil fuels, nuclear energy, or non-nuclear forms of renewable power are key issues in the upcoming set of elections in Taiwan, which will take place in January 2020.

Performers covered in white paint (right) and a dinosaur-like puppet used during the demonstration (left). Photo credit: Brian Hioe

That being said, environmental discourse in Taiwan has primarily focused on these issues—without discussion of the potentially irreversible course of climate change and the threat to humanity’s continued existence that it poses. It may be that more efforts at raising awareness are needed.

Brian Hioe was one of the founding editors of New Bloom. He is a freelance writer on social movements and politics, and occasional translator. A New York native and Taiwanese-American, he has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature. He was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018.

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About New Bloom

New Bloom is an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific, founded in Taiwan in 2014 in the wake of the Sunflower Movement. We seek to put local voices in touch with international discourse, beginning with Taiwan.